Jennifer Barnett

Jennifer Barnett was born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia. She married a farmer from the West Coast of SA, where they raised four children, prior to moving to Queensland. Jennifer then returned to her nursing career, before studying traditional medicine. The author became vitally interested in herbal medicine, as well as the survival skills and cultures practised by indigenous races prior to European intervention.

Previous to writing her novel, Jennifer dreamed of creating a story involving an old tree sharing her bygone memories with a regenerated forest, about an ancient tribe that dwelled in her territory at Yaraan Grove. The ancient clan bore the name totem “Booran”, referring to the indigenous name for pelican; water birds that inhabited the local wetlands, prior to a drought that mysteriously drove them to the central desert country.

Concurrent to the drought, freak rains flooded the inland desert and transformed a massive saltpan into an enormous inland sea. Many thousands of pelicans that inhabited the southern river-lands and south-eastern wetlands, were instinctively aware of the distant food source, thus departing in droves for the great inland sea. The devastated Booran Clan made the decision to follow the great birds’ flight path to unknown inland territory, rather than perish in their drought stricken land.

The author is particularly fascinated by the ability of the indigenous Australian bush-men to access a higher sense, or instinct, that enabled them to narrate their “memories” about ancient times with the younger generations, that were shared as dreamtimes in their own languages, without the need for written history. Artwork and Dreamtime is the history of Australian Aboriginal culture. Jennifer enjoys sketching and created her own artwork for the book that, along with the cover, includes twenty-one pencilled sketches.